home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would
be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and
well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman
left sole masters of the situation.

In the desire of Parliament to do justice to the Irish peasant, whose
condition did once so loudly demand amelioration, justice to the
landlord has gone by the board. For we cannot call it justice to make
him alone suffer. His rents have been reduced from 25 to 30 per cent.
and over, but all the rent charges, mortgages, debts and dues have
been retained at their full value. The scheme of reduction does not
pass beyond the tiller of the soil, and the landlord is the sole
loser.[C]

Beyond this he suffers from the want of finality in legislation.
Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A
fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the
next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith
of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money from the Board of Works
for the improvement of his estate, for stone cottages for his
tenantry, for fences, drainage, and the like, suddenly his income is
still further reduced; but the interest he has to pay for the loan
contracted on the broader basis remains the same. Which is a kind of
thing on all fours with the plan of locking up a debtor so that he
cannot work at his trade, while ordering him to pay so much weekly
from earnings which the law itself prevents his making.

If the sum of misery remains constant in Ireland, its distribution has
changed hands. The small deposits in the savings-banks have increased
to an enormous extent, and in many places where the tenants have for